Niagara: A History of the Falls (41 page)

Drinking beer with old army buddies in the Canadian Corps Association headquarters, Red Hill would often dream up bizarre schemes for making money. At one point he planned a gigantic sweepstakes in which one hundred barrels of different colours would engage in a race over the cataract. None of these projects ever materialized.

He became known as the guardian of the Niagara. The press called him the Wizard of the River and the Master Hero of Niagara Falls, but he wanted only one title, “riverman,” and he asked that they use it. His phone number, 717, became well known to police and firemen who got into the habit of calling it when a body had to be recovered or a stranded tourist rescued.

The Niagara was a cruel river. Its sharp rocks battered corpses and stripped them of their clothing. Hill once dragged a body to shore by its necktie – the only article of apparel left. Often the bodies had to be retrieved from difficult places: the bottom of the gorge at the Whirlpool was one. Hill would haul the remains to shore and lash the corpse to Dead Man’s Tree, which had fallen halfway into the water. Then, with the body wrapped in burlap and tied to a pole, he’d carry it four hundred feet up the wall of the gorge, an exertion that could take four hours.

In July 1920, Hill was hired by a fifty-eight-year-old barber from Bristol, Charles G. Stephens, to help him attempt to rival Annie Taylor and Bobby Leach by tumbling over the Horseshoe in a barrel. The “demon barber,” as the press dubbed him, was no stranger to close calls. After a serious illness at the age of five, he had been given up for dead and was actually placed in a coffin. Before the lid was closed and the death certificate was signed, the doctor decided to make a final examination. He was more than a little taken aback when the small corpse suddenly looked up at him with his eyes very much alive. By the time he reached his teens, Stephens was robust enough to work for a time in Welsh coal mines.

Later he became a barber, but barbering was too dull for him. And so he proceeded to indulge in a series of stunts on the British music-hall circuit. Crack marksmen shot sugar cubes off his head; knife throwers split apples fastened to his neck. He made a performance of entering lions’ cages, first to kiss one of the beasts, then to thrust his head into a lion’s mouth, and finally to shave one of his customers in the cage while the animals looked on. Now, having successfully leaped off the Firth of Forth bridge, he decided to take on the Falls.

A mild-looking man, tall and slight, with a bushy moustache and greying hair, he ignored the pleas of his wife, Annie, and their eleven children to give up the scheme. He was in it for the money, he admitted. Once he had conquered the cataract he could take his barrel back to the music halls and show a motion picture of his feat. He had already hired a camera crew to produce the film.

Stephens’s barrel weighed six hundred pounds and was built of two-inch-thick Russian oak held together by steel hoops. It was padded with cushions of duck feathers made by Hill’s wife, Beatrice, and ballasted by an anvil. A harness would keep Stephens reasonably steady, and an oxygen tank and mask would keep him from suffocating.

There is some argument as to whether Hill tried to dissuade Stephens or encouraged him. Certainly he helped him launch the barrel. Bobby Leach was one who expressed serious doubts. He took one look at the contraption and announced that the Englishman would never survive the trip over the Falls. The barrel, he said, wasn’t sturdy enough – an assessment backed up by Richard Carter, captain of the
Maid of the Mist
.

In order to circumvent the authorities, who were trying in a half-hearted way to prevent further barrel adventures, Stephens checked into a hotel in Hamilton under an assumed name. He spent the early morning reading his Bible, enjoyed a brief breakfast, and then set out for the Falls. He had written out two cables; the appropriate one would be sent to his wife when the adventure was over and included a message for his manager. The first read: “FEAT ACCOMPLISHED. TELL DAN,” the Other: “PROFESSOR STEPHENS LOST IN THE ATTEMPT.”

At 8:30 on the morning of July 11, 1920, at Snyder’s Point, three miles above the Falls, Stephens prepared to enter the barrel, which had been painted with zebra stripes for easy identification. He took off his jacket and his red plush vest with its two rows of medals – some won in the Great War, others given for feats of daring – and handed them to Hill with four hundred pounds sterling for safekeeping.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll be back to get it in a short time.”

“Good luck, Charlie,” Hill said. “I’ll be waiting down below for you with a doctor and an undertaker.”

As the barrel was towed out into the current, apparently a hoop snapped off. In spite of this, Hill cut the barrel loose, then raced back down the river bank to see it tumble over the Falls and vanish into the foam. By this time the word was out, and crowds were streaming down to both banks to witness the barrel’s recovery. They waited in vain. At noon all hopes had faded, for Stephens’s three-hour supply of oxygen would have been used up by then. Suddenly a black object appeared in the foam and drifted toward shore. “There he is!” somebody shouted. But it was only a broken stave. During the rest of the afternoon more fragments were washed ashore. Obviously, the river had reduced the barrel to kindling.

All night long Hill and others searched for Stephens’s body. They found only an arm, torn off at the shoulder, still attached to the safety harness. It was identified by a tattoo showing two hands clasped around a floral garland with the inscription
“Forget me not, Annie.”
Stephens must have tied the ballasting anvil to his feet. When the bottom was torn out of the barrel by the force of the water, he had been wrenched from his harness and sucked into the maelstrom.

Instead of scaring off future thrill seekers, Stephens’s tragedy seemed to stimulate them. Within a month authorities in both cities logged inquiries from nineteen people asking permission to ride a barrel over the Falls. No sensible civic father was going to give anybody permission to plunge over the Horseshoe in a barrel, or in anything else. On the other hand, the daredevils brought in business. The police made a show of banning any such performance, but the truth was that anybody who really wanted to pull it off could do so with only a modicum of secrecy.

Jean Lussier, a thirty-five-year-old salesman, circus stunt-man, and racing-car driver from Springfield, Massachusetts, had no trouble evading the authorities when he decided to hurl himself over the brink in a rubber ball of his own invention. Eight feet in diameter, the ball consisted of a light steel framework covered with canvas and lined with thirty-two inner tubes inflated to a pressure of thirty-five pounds. A 150-pound weight would serve as ballast. After two Akron rubber companies had declined to build the contraption, Lussier eventually put it together himself in his garage.

At two in the afternoon of July 4, 1928 – the biggest tourist day of the year – Lussier, wearing a blue-and-white bathing suit, took up a seated position in the ball. He secured himself in a harness, taped a small aperture shut, and was towed from the American shore into the middle of the stream.

At 3:20 the big orange ball was cut loose. At 4:25 it plunged over the crest of the Horseshoe. As it went over, it bounced into the air like a child’s toy, tearing away the ballast so that Lussier found himself dropping head first into the waters below.

As the ball bobbed down the river, Red Hill commandeered a rescue boat and strained at the oars to reach it before it was pummelled to destruction in the Whirlpool Rapids. Hill managed to tie a rope through one of the wire loops on the outer skin. Then he began an exhausting journey, fighting the current, toward the safety of the shore.

It wasn’t easy. The ball weighed close to nine hundred pounds because water continued to leak into it. Even if Lussier were saved from the rapids, he might easily drown as the level rose inside his odd craft. Heavy and unwieldy, the ball swung back and forth, forcing Hill to seesaw his way toward the bank. When at last he reached it, the ball had to be ripped open with knives. Lussier, badly bruised and bloody from gashes suffered in his dramatic dive, was slightly stunned from the impact but alive. The plunge, he said, was “like a big ski jump.” A vast mob surrounded him, cheering, laughing, and praising his pluck.

Like so many others, Lussier expected to get rich from his adventure. He didn’t. He toured with his ball and for small fees displayed it at the Niagara Falls Museum, Thomas Barnett’s original enterprise. As a sideline he cut small pieces from the inner tubes and sold them to tourists at fifty cents apiece. His profits did not end when the inner tubes that had gone over the Falls were all chopped up. As he later remarked, “I must have cut up and sold 450 … when I’d run short I’d go over to the Falls garage and they’d give me any discarded tubes too badly patched for use.”

Lussier became a fixture in Niagara Falls, New York, where he worked as a machinist, recounting his story to those who would listen and announcing, from time to time, new stunts. These included a projected plunge over the American Falls, something that had never been attempted because of the mountain of rocks at the base. It didn’t come off. Lussier died in 1971, forty-three years after his feat.

In 1930, two years after Lussier’s plunge, Red Hill tried his best to persuade another daredevil to abandon his plans to attempt the journey over the Falls in a one-ton barrel. It is hard to believe that George Stathakis was entirely sane. A forty-six-year-old Greek short-order cook and a self-styled mystic and philosopher, Stathakis needed money with which to launch a literary career. He had written several philosophical texts in his native tongue and even paid to have one,
The Mysterious Veil of Humanity through the Ages
, translated into English. In this rambling, incoherent tract, Stathakis claimed to have lived for a thousand years, to have visited the North Pole, and to have seen Niagara Falls long before it had receded to its current site.

Now he was planning a new book to be called
From the Bosom of Niagara
, which, he said, would form part of a trilogy tracing the story of mankind from ancient times into the distant future. Proceeds from the barrel stunt, he believed, would pay for the publication of these works – “the dream of my life.”

The heavy barrel, ten feet long and five feet in diameter, with steel bumpers at each end to help cushion the shock of impact, did not impress Red Hill. He tried to talk Stathakis out of the venture, but the Greek was not to be dissuaded. Supremely confident, he set off at 3:35 on the afternoon of July 5, accompanied by a 105-year-old turtle named Sonny Boy. Stathakis said the turtle would recount the story of this adventure if its master succumbed.

In the turbulence below the Falls, Hill and his son Red, Jr., waited and waited, long after the crowds had vanished from the shoreline. There was no sign of the barrel. Since Stathakis had enough oxygen for only three hours, Hill concluded by nightfall that he must be dead. In fact, the Greek had suffocated. His barrel was trapped for fourteen hours behind the curtain of water and did not come out until dawn of the following day.

Hill, after hauling the battered barrel to the shore, worked for several hours cutting through the scores of bolts that held the lid tight. So securely had the eccentric Stathakis locked himself inside that it was quite possible, if he were not already dead, he would have expired from a lack of air while his rescuers struggled to release him.

His corpse was strapped to a water-soaked mattress. Sonny Boy, however, was alive. Hill set up a tent on the lawn of the Lafayette Hotel on the Canadian side, from which he ran a taxi business. Here, for a fee, he displayed both the barrel and the turtle until a couple from Buffalo made off with Sonny Boy, apparently intending to hold it for ransom. Hill gave chase in one of his own vehicles, but the thieves escaped. The riverman then hired a detective who tracked down the reptile. Hill continued to display Sonny Boy for profit, but contrary to Stathakis’s forecast, the turtle wasn’t talking.

The following winter a different kind of disaster made international headlines. While daredevils were plunging over the cataract and testing their courage against the rapids, the river was continuing its slow work, nibbling away at the soft shales concealed beneath the harder platform of dolostone. The eroded shape of the Horseshoe Falls bore witness to this implacable attack.

On Saturday, January 10, 1931, the familiar even crest of the American Falls was destroyed as a huge chunk toppled into the gorge, creating a wedge-shaped indentation 150 feet deep and 130 feet wide, about three hundred feet from Luna Island. It was a spectacular event witnessed by only a few stray tourists. Gerald Cook and his wife were standing at Prospect Point at 5:35 that afternoon when they heard a furious rumbling they mistook for an earthquake. The ground around them shook so fiercely that their small son began to cry in terror. A few minutes later they saw the crest of the Falls seemingly move outward as large pieces of rock were hurled into the air. The dry shale layers above the river level, attacked by weather and internal seepage, had finally crumbled.

Arthur Baker, a local man, was at Prospect Point with a friend from Cleveland when they too heard the rumbling. They turned to face the Falls in time to see a section about one hundred feet deep crack off and fall into the gorge, creating a prodigious splash that rose fifty feet above the crest. A few seconds later another section gave way. Chunks of rock continued to fall that night and the following day. The last piece broke off at 2:30 Sunday afternoon.

The entire contour of the American Falls was altered, and the change in appearance was the greatest in living memory. The crash brought thousands of tons of rock down and piled them up below the cataract. Fears were roused that the rest of the cascade was threatened. The pile of broken boulders – some as big as houses – now reached halfway up the waterfall, obscuring a section of it and lessening its beauty. Rivulets of water coursed through this stone jungle, sending up a curtain of opaque white vapour that further shut off the view.